In a recent piece for Prospect magazine, Philip Ball denounces the “playing God” objection, often made against some proposed uses of biotechnology, as a “meaningless, dangerous cliché”. More specifically, Ball mentions the objection in rela…

Professor Walter Sinnot-Armstrong gave a Leverhulme lecture last night on the question of addiction and responsibility.  Click on the image or the link below to download or view a pdf of his presentation. "Are addicts responsible…

We will have more blog posts relating to the ethics of addiction and Walter Sinnot Armstrong's talk over the next 24 hours, but here are a number of related papers by members of the centre provided here as a library resource (UPDATED 26…

The Texas Board of Education recently approved changes to the state's high school social studies curriculum. The Board also has responsibility for reviewing and approving textbooks for use in Texas schools according to whether they meet…

In a case that is probably echoed daily across this country and many others, an amphetamine addict Michael Hunter was jailed yesterday for attacking a friend with a hammer. The judge noted that "amphetamine had clearly affected Hunter’…

What does synthetic biology mean? Quinn Norton argues it means the end of the drug war: synthetic biology might be able to do the wonderful things (as well as the dangerous things) envisioned by Venter and others, but it definitely can prod…

Blogs, papers and other resources relating to news of first synthetic life form Updated 27/05/10

Sometimes science reveals distinctions to be false. Time and space were thought to be distinct, separate things, until Einstein showed that they were fundamentally intertwined. Graphite and diamond were thought to be made of distinct substa…

With his new paper Craig Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into it’s destiny. The challenge is to eat the apple without choking on the worm.

Craig Venter’s team have succeeded in producing a synthetic bacterium capable of self-replication. The group synthesised from scratch a variant of the Mycoplasma mycoides genome, which they then transplanted into a different Mycoplasma spec…